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Sunday, December 16, 2012

With the year coming to an end,
it’s time to start looking forward to the cinematic bounty 2013 will bring.
Next year’s slate of movies has a lot of potential, so I’m hopeful that we get
to see some real gems. Here’s what I’m looking forward to the most:

1) Before Midnight

Two of my favorite movies of
all time are Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, which I like to think of
as an inseparable tandem (like the way a lot of people think of the first two Godfathers). I have supreme confidence
that director Richard Linklater and actors Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy can
craft a worthy addition to this ongoing love story. (Hopefully not the last
installment, though there have been intimations that it might be. :( )2) Upstream Color

It’s been 8 years since the
release of Primer, writer/director Shane
Carruth’s mind-bending, super-indie movie about time travel. Carruth has been
MIA ever since, until now. Upstream Color
is debuting at the Sundance Film Festival, which doesn’t bode well for a wide
theatrical release. But considering that Carruth is embracing the digital
distribution model (he is offering Primer
on his website, DRM-free, for $15), I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to buy or rent
it online in the spring. I’m eager to see if Carruth can deliver on the
potential he displayed with Primer and
emerge as one of the really talented American filmmakers working today.3) Gravity

It’s been 6 years since Alfonso
Cuarón’s last movie, the
well-regarded Children of Men. The
details of this movie have been kept largely under wraps, driving my curiosity
through the roof.4) To The Wonder

A new Terrence Malick film is
always cause for celebration. This one didn’t have a great reaction at the
Toronto Film Festival, the common complaint being that it was too Malicky. (Star Ben Affleck quipped: “To The Wonder is for people who like a
little Malick with their Malick.”) Sounds good to me.

5) Star Trek Into Darkness

I was such a big fan of the
2009 reboot, despite initial reservations. I found it ridiculously
entertaining, full of great characters that were perfectly cast, as well as it
being just a gorgeous-looking movie. I had my doubts about JJ Abrams, but this
movie made a believer out of me. I expect this one to be just as good if not
better than the first.

6) The Great Gatsby

One of my most anticipated
movies of 2012, pushed back to summer ’13. Baz Luhrmann is a master at what he
does, combining visual panache with epic storytelling while getting actors to
give surprisingly great performances. Moulin
Rouge is, of course, unimpeachable, but Australia
remains an underappreciated gem.

7) Iron Man 3

The Avengers sealed it: I could watch Downey do this character for a dozen more
movies. There’s a little bit of intrigue with the director’s chair belonging to
Shane Black this time around, but I’m sure the end result will be the super
entertaining movie we’ve come to expect from this franchise.8) Nymphomaniac

Lars von Trier usually has a
strong sexual component to his films, so it’ll be interesting to see what
happens when he makes sex the overriding (har) theme of his next movie. He’s on
something of a mid-to-late-career roll—his last two movies, Antichrist and Melancholia, are worthy additions to his filmography. We’ll
see if he can keep it up. (har har)

9) The Unknown Known

Errol Morris might be the most
consistently good filmmaker working today. He seems to hit a home run every
time out, regardless of subject matter. This one’s about Rumsfeld, but that’s
really beside the point. Just know that there’s a pretty good chance that it’ll
be a fantastic movie.

10) Pacific Rim

Liberated from Hobbit hell, Guillermo del Toro returns
with what seems to be a bombastic piece of film pop. Giant robots vs. giant monsters?
Yeah, I guess I’ll see that.DHS

Friday, November 16, 2012

The title of this entry is a
bit of a misnomer. There won’t really be any writing advice, just some truths
about writing. Some might call them hard truths, but they’re just really how
things are and it’s up to you whether you take them hard or not.First of all, congrats to
everyone who is even remotely adhering to the NaNoWriMo schedule. Halfway
through, you’ve probably experienced your fair share of ups and downs. There
have been days when you’ve met or exceeded the prescribed word count and those
days have ended with a smile on your face. There have been days when you’ve
failed to write more than a few sentences—or anything at all—and on those days
you have been grumpy, irritated, and anxious. I’m sure that for some of you,
your daily disposition has corresponded to the number of words you’ve typed out,
and the last two weeks have undoubtedly been a rollercoaster of emotion. If
your mood is particularly dark and low and frustrated at this point, you’re
probably thinking that this experience has shown you that you aren’t a writer.
And you’re probably right.But even if you’re on cloud 9
about your progress and every day is one of unfettered joy, full of typing and
having fun and marveling at your word count, chances are you are also not going
to come out of this a full-time writer.The fact is if you’re feeling
anything other than a calm neutrality about the writing process, you’re
probably not going to be in the writing game for the long haul.Here’s the deep dark secret
about writers: they don’t particularly feel one way or another about writing. They
don’t hate it (obviously), nor do they like it all that much. Even that old saw
about writers who hate writing but love having written isn’t really true.They sort of just write. All
the time, every day.Writers are compelled to write,
simple as that. They don’t get too high or low about it, they just do it. Feeling
bad about an unproductive writing day and feeling happy about a good writing
day are both reactions writers—professional ones—never have. For them, writing is
just something that needs to be done every day, in a sort of vaguely
dispassionate way. I’ll try to draw an easy-to-understand parallel :Think of writing like brushing
your teeth.This is an analogy all but the most
hygienically negligent can understand. You brush your teeth daily. No matter
what. It’s like not even an option to go to bed without having done it. You can
be bone-dead tired, or crazy busy, or stuck in some foreign place far from home
surrounded by unfamiliar people—you will still make time to brush your teeth. You
even do it twice a day, preferably.You don’t really “like” or “hate”
doing it. If anything, it’s a little inconvenient, or boring, or a chore. But
you do it because you are compelled. Sure, there are very practical reasons for
doing it: the prevention of tooth decay, the elimination of bad breath, etc.,
etc. But I don’t think that stuff goes through anyone’s mind when they are
actually in the process of brushing their teeth. I know it doesn’t go through mine.
I just do it without thinking too much about it, and I suspect you do too.Brushing our teeth is such a
part of our daily routine and so disconnected from its long-term rewards that
we don’t feel “happy” that we do it every night. We’re not high-fiving
ourselves after another successful tooth brushing. We also don’t stress about
it during the day, wondering whether we’ll be able to fit it into our schedule.
We know we will, no matter what. And we don’t feel miserable about going a
whole day without brushing our teeth, because it doesn’t happen. Ok, there’s
that handful of times in your entire life
when you go a day without brushing your teeth. But those are very rare
occasions indeed.This pretty accurately
describes how true writers think of writing. They don’t get down about not
writing, mostly because it never happens. (Even those authors who put out a
book a decade are writing furiously every day, I guarantee you, perhaps even more
than anyone else.) They might conceive of “feeling bad” if they didn’t write
for a week, but it’d be little more than a thought experiment, like if someone
asked you how bad you’d feel after a week of not brushing your teeth. You’d
imagine you’d feel pretty awful about it, but any speculation is pointless
because it’d never happen. Not brushing your teeth for a week wouldn't feel bad
so much as just plain wrong.Also, writers aren’t constantly
patting themselves on the back for writing, in the same way we don’t give
ourselves props for brushing our teeth. And just like writers, we don’t
necessarily take any long-term satisfaction from the activity. Someone’s likely
reaction to a lifetime free of tooth decay would probably not be “Go me!”,
rather “Well, yeah.” It’s not too hard to see why doing something like brushing
your teeth because you think it’s fun or it makes you happy or it leaves you
with a sense of accomplishment could be very dangerous. Fun things can become
un-fun, and dangled carrots lose their appeal. If sustained activity is what is
desired, better to be compelled than rewarded; the compelled person will
continue to do something no matter what, and the ones who do something for the
feeling they get from it will always be vaguely dissatisfied and eventually
quit doing that thing.It's ultimately kind of inexplicable
why writers write. I don’t think there’s a lot of choice involved. Writers
write in the same way that birds fly south for the winter or bears hibernate. That
fable about the scorpion and the frog seems relevant here.
For those struggling through this month, you have my sympathies and I hope at
the end of the month you’ll be buoyed by the knowledge that there’s this thing
you don’t ever have to do again. For the others who are deriving great joy from
this process, I am happy for you and admit to regarding you with a certain
amount of wistfulness. There was a time when my own words gave me a fair amount
of immediate pleasure, when writing was unqualified fun. Eventually I found
Hunter S. Thompson’s sentiment to be true when he said that writing, like
[having sex], is only fun for amateurs.But of course we all start out
as amateurs, and there’s nothing wrong with having fun. For those having a
blast with NaNoWriMo, I will say this: If that happy, joyful feeling of writing
devolves into something a little less pleasurable, if it becomes harder for you
to write, if you don’t exactly dread writing but you also aren’t especially
ecstatic about it…and yet despite all of this you can’t stop writing, then you’re
probably a full-blown, no-holds-barred writer. What I’m trying to say is don’t
be too worried if the fun goes away. Writing isn’t really supposed to be fun;
like anything worthwhile it’s hard work and stressful and time-consuming. And
that’s probably as good an explanation as to why we writers keep coming back to
it.To paraphrase David Mamet: Of
course writing is hard work. If it weren’t, then what’d be the point?DHS

Thursday, November 1, 2012

I hope everyone had a nice
Halloween. I don’t know about anyone else, but my consumption of Snickers minis
goes through the roof this time of year. Good stuff.

The All Hallow’s Read promotion
for Deadly Reflections was a roaring
success. Thousands of readers snagged a free copy over the last two days, and I
couldn’t be more pleased.

Today marks the release of the
“paperback” version of Deadly Reflections,
or whatever the equivalent is for an ebook. It has a brand new cover and
there’s a short Q&A with yours truly at the end. There were also some
typographical fixes made, so it should read cleanly across all the devices on
which it can be read. If you enjoyed the book in the past, be sure to tell your
friends or followers. I’d like to see DR
continue to find appreciative readers as we move forward. (Also, check out the
expanded interview with Patrick Mattox in the Deadly Reflections section of
this blog, where we talk about the creation of the new cover.)

November 1st also marks the first
day of NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. This is the time of year
when everyone with literary ambitions becomes month-long weekend warriors
attempting to complete a 50,000-word novel by the end of the month. To
accomplish this, one must maintain a daily output of 1,667 words—no small feat.

There have been some snide
remarks made by “real writers” about this event. They seem to take offense at
the prospect that some neophyte with a word processor thinks he or she can dash
out a novel just like that, as if it were that easy.

To that, I say “balderdash.”
(With maybe a sprinkling of “poppycock” and “bunkum.”)

If someone wants to partake in
the venerable tradition of written storytelling, I am more than willing to
welcome them into the fold. I think that, yes, the newcomers will find the work
challenging and the discipline it takes to sit and write for a couple hours a
day hard to master. But, if they stick with it, I believe they will also find
how rewarding it can be to have something to show for the day, week, month.
And, perhaps, despite all the frustrations and heartbreak and anxiety that come
with writing, some of those people will decide to continue doing it after
November, and some of those people
will enrich the world with great stories in the future. There is and always
will be a need for great storytellers. This is a month full of promise, for
everyone, not just the writers.

And it starts today. So: if you
have an idea (or even if you don’t; there have been plenty of great “plot-less”
novels), try writing a couple thousand words before midnight. And if you feel
good about the results, try it again tomorrow. See how many days you can string
together, and at the end of the month you might find yourself pleasantly surprised.
(Remember: This is mostly about quantity. A rough first draft after a month’s
work is nothing to sneeze at. In fact, it’s something to be very, very proud
of.)

With my next novel deep into
the editing process, I am not quite ready to start a new novel. But that doesn’t
mean I’m not constantly writing something, whether it be an essay, or a short
story, or just writing to see whether something will lead somewhere. So in an
act of solidarity with all those attempting the Herculean feat this month, I
will duly put in my daily work and try to hit the 1,667 mark every day. At the
end of the day, I’ll post the number of words I managed to wrestle to the page on
my Twitter and hopefully we can encourage each other to keep going. Let’s just
have fun, let go, and write.

For all those hoping to have a
productive month, I wish you the best of luck.

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

It’s that time of year again.
I’m talking, of course, about All Hallow’s Read, when creepy, unsettling books
mysteriously turn up at your doorstep, ready to terrify and delight those bold
enough to turn its pages.

I am pleased beyond all measure
to have my book participate in what is well on its way to becoming a venerable
tradition. Deadly Reflections is free today and tomorrow, right through Halloween. For these two days only, DR
will have a special variant cover to mark the occasion, as well as a bonus short
story, which might frankly be the most unsettling seven pages you read this
week. It’ll at least be in the running for that distinction, I’m pretty
confident to say.

So everyone be safe this year—but
not too safe—and don’t be afraid to be afraid….Curl up to a blood-curdling book,
whether it be mine or someone else’s, and let the spirit of All Hallow’s Read
give you a couple of sleepless nights reading and being scared out of your
wits.

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Fair warning: I’ve had this
album for barely 24 hours now, so even though I’ve listened to it at least 3
times through, these are first impressions that are apt to change as the album
gets lived with a while.

RED is a somewhat schizophrenic album, evenly divided between songs in
the vein of what she started out with (“Old Taylor”) and the pop-tastic stuff
she’s been giving us a taste of for the last month or so (“New Taylor”). This
new musical direction has been dissected and scrutinized, with many taken aback
at what seems to be her rebirth as a pure pop star without the “country”
qualifier that has been attached to her since day one. After a few listens, I
can confirm that the difference between the new stuff and her old stuff has not
been overstated—they’re pretty different. There is, however, a fair number of her
familiar country-sounding songs on the album for those who like that stuff
exclusively. Maybe that is why the album is so long; at 16 tracks, it’s large
enough to accommodate every conceivable audience.

With that said, you can tell
that Taylor’s heart is more in the pure pop side of things these days and she’s
now equipped with plenty of arena-ready songs that are cut from the same cloth
as previous Max Martin-produced megahits by artists like Britney and P!nk. Taylor
is careful not to clump these songs together on the album, but sometimes there’s
only one slow, ballady thing between 2 dancey, dubsteppy things; it’s as if she
was impatience to get back to them. These future hits represent the kind of
broad-appeal music that will be associated with Taylor for this album cycle,
and it’s the new norm until she makes her “return to her roots” country album,
which might be as early as the next one, depending on how much she takes the
inevitable backlash to heart.

Whatever initial skepticism you
might have, the poppy stuff is actually pretty good and very listenable. They
definitely make the biggest impressions during the initial listens. They are
just as good as other stuff you hear, some even have a familiar air about them,
like the Katy Perry-cadenced “I Knew You Were Trouble.” My favorites so far are
“Red,” “22,” and, of course, “We Are Never Ever…”

As for the slower stuff, I have
to give them some more time to make an impression. The ones that are grabbing
me now are “Begin Again” and, unsurprisingly, “Everything Has Changed,” her collaboration
with Ed Sheeran, which is a song approximately everyone else on the planet
likes (it’s #1 on iTunes). To be honest I was more wary of these duets (there’s
another one with the Snow Patrol guy) than I was with the pop direction.
Letting in an audible male presence seemed like an undesirable intrusion into
Tay’s decidedly girl-centric (and unabashedly girly) world. But the two men she
allowed to make an appearance on the album are such sensitive and epicene
fellows that the uncompromised girl POV we’ve come to expect from Taylor’s
music is barely disturbed.

I was thinking of how to wrap up
an assessment of RED, what I could say to encapsulate the sound and quality of
the album. Then it hit me:

RED sounds like a new Jenny
Lewis album.

More accurately, it sounds like
a new album from Rilo Kiley, the band Jenny Lewis used to front. The
similarities between Jenny and Tay are actually kind of astonishing. Not only
does Tay sound like Jenny at times throughout the album (especially on the song
“Stay Stay Stay”), they really are similar singer/songwriters. Jenny always
wrote about the whole relationship spectrum—dating, love, break-ups, regret,
sorrow, glimpses of happiness—just like Taylor always has. And Jenny’s songs
always had the same kind of passion and heartcraft that Tay puts into hers. Also,
there was definitely a country vibe to a lot of Rilo Kiley songs (see “More Adventurous”).

There are, however, two notable
differences between them. 1) Jenny’s willingness to put a sexual element into
her songs that Taylor is nowhere close to having. (Even though they share a
title, Rilo Kiley’s “15” is very
different from Tay’s, to say the least.) And 2) Jenny employs a fair amount of
irony and sardonicism in her work. I think it’s clear by now that Taylor does
not have one ironic bone in her body. She is at full earnestness, all the time.

You would think these two temperaments would result in
very different sounding music. But…but!....here’s
the big revelation: It turns out that Jenny’s irony and Tay’s sincerity don’t
sound all that different. I think a big reason for that is because Jenny’s
irony is tempered with a healthy dollop of sincerity and Tay’s sincerity is set
to the same kind of catchy beats that ironic songs (like “Billionaire” for
example) are set to. In any event, they somehow meet in the middle. I invite
you to compare these two songs: Rilo Kiley’s “Breaking Up” and Taylor’s “22.” Not
only are they very similar-sounding, I think they could both be performed by
the other artist in the exact same style as the original and it’d still make
perfect sense.﻿

Another area these two artists are
similar is the evolution of their sound. Rilo Kiley had a country flavor to a
lot of their early stuff, then they went for a more “pop” sound on their fourth
album, Under The Blacklight. (Their 4th
album! What is RED? Tay’s 4th album!) Taylor had more than a slight country
influence; she was a bona fide country artist on her first album. Even though Taylor
had a lot more “country” to shed from her music than Rilo Kiley, they still
managed to meet in the middle. It’s as if the release date of RED turned into
the answer to one of those classic word problems they give in middle school math
classes:

Question: If Rilo Kiley heads
east out of Los Angeles on foot, and Taylor Swift gets on a bullet train heading
west out of Nashville, when will they meet?

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

So, after many weeks adding up
to months of anticipation, I saw The
Master last night in Boston. This undoubtedly comes as welcome news for my
friends and family, as now I’ll probably finally be able to shut up about it.
Maybe. (Apologies also to those following my tweets; I know it’s been inordinately
heavy on the #THEMASTER70MM hashtag lately.)

It was also my introduction to
the Coolidge Corner Theatre, which has the only 70mm print of The Master in New England. It’s a
seriously cool venue. It has the trappings of a vintage movie house, the
auditorium is cozy and charmingly theatrical, and they have beer on tap. The
screen was nice and big, and the sound was nice and loud. I could see myself
frequenting the place every week, if only it wasn’t three hours away.

Here’s a panoramic view from
where I was sitting.

The 70 mm experience was
delightful. It was the first time I’ve ever seen a 70 mm projection and I think
I’m in love with it. Every frame compelled my interest. Colors seemed
especially lush, and details were startlingly clear (especially on some of the
closeups). It was really quite gorgeous. And of course it had that analog “warmth”
as well; it was quite something to see those “cigarette marks” alerting
everyone that a changeover of reels was about to occur. In an age when the term
is, for better or worse, an anachronym, it was really exciting to see a true “film”
once again.

So what did I think of The Master? Well, I liked it. In truth,
I’m a little in awe of it. The common refrain is that it all but requires
multiple viewings, and I suppose I endorse this point of view since I’m planning
to see it again next week, this time a mere 3 miles from my house. (And in
digital, which will be good for comparison’s sake, image quality-wise.)

I think it was not as big a
revelation as There Will Be Blood,
but only because PTA prepped us for this new one with his previous film. In
many ways, I think The Master is a
more shocking and audacious movie than TWBB,
which bodes well for its impact down the road, when we decide just how good it
is, really. (Instant classic? Or failed experiment? Or something in between?)

I could write a review that
would probably end up being embarrassing 6 months or 2 years or 5 years down
the road. I remember coming out of TWBB
and not exactly knowing what to make of it. If you had forced me to put down my
thoughts right then, it’d probably read like a lot of asinine babbling now,
especially when I’m pretty much on board with everyone else who says that it’s
a modern classic, an assessment that was not at all clear to me after the
initial viewing.

What I’m coming to find out
about movies by true visionaries is that you don’t need to make a decision
whether they are “good” or “bad” right away. Let it turn over in your mind a
little, and if it’s compelling enough, you’ll revisit it. I’ve found that to be
the most important question after a movie: Is it compelling? If it’s
compelling, you’ll rewatch it, even if you didn’t think it was very good. And
during those rewatches, you’ll open yourself up to the movie again, and you’ll be
responsive to any of those little things a director puts in a movie that he or
she thinks will make the movie better and a more worthwhile experience and
maybe even the best thing ever put on screen. And if the movie is made by eminently
talented people, there’s a good chance you’re seeing great art.

But if a movie isn’t
compelling, it really just sort of lies there, neither art nor entertainment,
just a vague memory of passing time. If you thought it was bad, it remains bad.
If you thought it was good, it never exceeds that initial judgment—it stays
just as good as you initially thought. And maybe it actually isn’t very good,
or, perhaps, it’s even better than
you thought, and if it is in fact great art, there’s almost no way you would be
able to take in all the nuances it has to offer with just one viewing. (Maybe
if you were Pauline Kael you’d be able to, but I’m talking about the rest of us
mortals.)

Compelling things offer us the
chance to have a conversation with them, to engage in an intellectual and
emotional back-and-forth, to change as we change, to grow alongside us. These
are the sorts of interactions that have the best chance of ultimately enriching
our lives, to affect the way we think, feel, respond—forever. And that’s a lot
more rewarding than just saying “This is good” or “This sucks” all willy-nilly.
Making snap judgments is pretty unfulfilling and empty, and no one comes to art
to feel emptier. That’s why, when something singularly compelling comes along,
we should be excited instead of rushing to praise or condemn it. In an
ephemeral world, compelling things have a defiant permanence. In a world where
there is accretive pressure to get everyone to think the exact same way,
compelling things give you thoughts you’ve never had before. They are opportunities
for personal growth.

I’m not sure if it’s a modern
classic, but if there’s one thing The
Master is, it’s compelling. Very, very much so. And that is more than
enough reason to celebrate it.

Monday, September 24, 2012

Hi all. Sorry for the lack of
updates lately. I’ve been in full-on-writing-the-next-book mode and it’s
consuming every last bit of spare time I have these days. Which is good. I’m
sure you’ll agree that a completed book trumps a few blog entries every time.
And before you ask, the writing’s going well. I remain cautiously optimistic
that there will be a major release from me by the end of the year. It may, in
fact, almost be time to start talking in public venues about what this release
will be. Not quite yet, but almost.(BTW, here’s a handy tip: Never
ask a writer how his writing’s going. Because it’s either going bad, in which
case he’ll wear a pained expression and basically start evincing an unhappiness
that’ll bring down everyone in the vicinity, or it’s going great and he won’t
be able to keep an annoyingly giddy smile off his face and there’ll be a strong
possibility that all he’ll want to talk about is how his characters are coming alive
most vividly or how he successfully solved a plot problem with particular élan
and you won’t be able to shut him up. Both scenarios make for an unpleasant
evening for you and everyone else in the room.)I will say I’m writing the
first book in a multi-volume series. I have high hopes and high expectations,
and I look forward to the challenges involved with working on a giant canvas.When I say I’m working on a
book, I do mean just that—a book, as opposed to a novel. What’s the difference?
To be honest, I’m not sure there technically is one, at least in the way I’m
thinking. Yes, novels are generally book-length works of fiction, while a “book”
can be any genre. All novels are books, but not all books are novels, that sort
of thing.But I also use the term “book”
to describe a particular kind of fiction as well, something distinct from “novels.”
To me, “novels” imply a more literary-minded sort of fiction. “Novels” win
prestigious awards like the Nobel Prize or the Pulitzer. They teach “novels” in
college classes. These are not the types of books I write.I admit that this is largely a
semantic exercise. A lot of people would call Deadly Reflections a novel, and they wouldn’t be wrong. This is
just a distinction I feel on a gut level.It’s kind of like the
difference between “movies” and “films.” There’s really no difference between
those two terms, but we all instinctively know there are some movies we would
never call “films.” House at the End of
the Street is not a “film.” Neither is Resident
Evil: Retribution. They aren’t out to change cinematic history, nor do they
aspire to be some great artistic achievement. They are just out to entertain as
many people as possible on a Saturday night in 2012.Likewise, my stories are meant
to entertain, to provide an experience that is as diverting and pleasurable as
possible. I feel weird attaching such a loaded and elevated term as “novel” to
them. Hence, they are just “books” to me.This is not to say that “novels”
are inherently better than “books,” or that “films” are better than “movies.” I
wouldn’t call Iron Man a “film,” but
it is a supremely kick-ass movie, and certainly better than a lot of so-called “films.”
It is true that films have more on their mind. They tackle the big questions
and big themes. But even though films and novels might illuminate the human
condition (or try to), many do so at the expense of fun. On the other hand, movies
and books, as I define them, get to devote themselves solely to entertainment,
an endeavor that I consider no more or less important than what the more
highbrow artwork out there is trying to accomplish. There is something vital
and necessary about a great piece of entertainment, which is why I think
Stephen King’s and Elmore Leonard’s books will prove to be just as immortal as
Salinger’s and Updike’s.Ultimately, there is room for
both entertainment and edification. Sometimes you feel like one and sometimes
you feel like the other. Most people are willing participants in either
audience, depending on how they feel at the time. (“Should I read this novel
that’ll make me a better person, or this other book that will just be plain
fun?”) As for what an artist decides to do, I can tell you it isn’t much of a
decision. An author just writes words as they occur to him, and essentially
does what he feels he can do, and offers what he can in a way not dissimilar to
how most people live their day-to-day lives. It became clear to me early on
that I may not be able to give everyone the secret to life or uncover universal
truths in a virtuosic way.But I could probably tell a
pretty engaging yarn. So I tossed my hat into the entertainment arena and haven’t
looked back and am so far without regret.

—————

With all that said, I’m going
to see a film tomorrow. J I’ll be at the 6:30 showing of The Master in 70mm at The Coolidge Corner Theatre in Boston. I’ve
never been there before, and I’m very excited because it looks like a pretty
classy place, a perfect venue to see what may very well turn out to be my most
anticipated movie of the next 5 years (or until PTA makes another film). I’m
not looking forward to the roughly five-and-a-half hours of travel time
involved to get there and back, but on the bright side it will afford me plenty
of writing time.Have a good evening everyone.

If you're like me—and I suspect
there're more of you out there than one might think—you've been eagerly
awaiting D.T. Max's bio of David Foster Wallace ever since it was excerpted in
The New Yorker 3.5 years ago. And you've also, like me, read and re-read all of
Wallace's published output. You've even tracked down his unpublished stuff, and
are rather blasé about the impending release of Both Flesh and Not, a volume of previously uncollected work,
because you're pretty sure you've read it all. (Which doesn't mean you won't
get it on release day and read everything again, gratefully.) You own multiple
copies of Infinite Jest. You follow
Nick Maniatis on Twitter and compulsively click on every link he deems tweet-worthy. You own the
Charlie Rose interviews on DVD. You have 9 hours of DFW interviews on your
iPod, 3.4 hours of readings (not including audiobooks), 4.4 hours of tributes
and remembrances. You've torn out the pages of a yard sale copy of IJ so you could put the story in
chronological order.

So, if you're such a person, a self-admitted DFW nut, does Max's book have any
juicy new nuggets to offer you, anything you didn’t already know? Well, there
are a couple things, but nothing too major. The simple fact is that if you've
read all the books and all the interviews and all the tributes (and listened to
all the audio tributes and radio interviews, natch) and have gone through all
the supplemental material like the Conversations
With book and Lipsky's Although Of Course... and Boswell’s Understanding
and Carlisle’s Elegant Complexity and
both editions of Stephen Burn’s IJ
companion, and have even watched stuff like that hour-long videotaped interview
with Bonnie Nadell and all the videos of the Ransom Center symposia on YouTube,
if you’ve done all that, well, Max's bio is going to cover a lot of familiar
ground for you. There are some things in Every
Love Story you can tell would be new and interesting for the casual reader,
but you end up kind of skimming a lot of it because when, for example, Max does
stuff like quote from a syllabus from a Wallace-taught class, you not only
recognize the words, you've seen scans of the actual syllabus.

The best part of the book by far is when Max quotes from Wallace's letters.
(Well, when he quotes from letters you haven't already read/heard other people
read aloud/seen scans of.) Wallace was an inveterate writer of letters and
apparently there are copious amounts of epistolary correspondence; Max had some 850 pages of Wallace-penned letters at his disposal. (It seems he
wrote to DeLillo about pretty much Everything, from writing tips to problems
with his publisher to buying a new house.) The letters are written in DFW's
familiar (and therefore comforting) voice; he wrote them with the same
intelligence, wit, and insight with which he wrote gosh darn near everything.
(In that respect he rivals Fitzgerald for having never ever written a weak
sentence. Like, ever. [apologies to TS]) When a volume of his letters is
eventually published, it will be a true event, and pretty close to Holy Grail-type
material for Wallace fans—rivaled perhaps only by a facsimile of the
handwritten IJ manuscript or
"Author's Cut" of IJ with
hundreds of pages of restored cuts (one of the amusing tidbits in the bio: Michael
Silverblatt called up Pietsch to see if he could read the IJ outtakes).

I will say that Max's bio is a nice compendium/repository of most of the available
info out there and is especially helpful in the chronology dept (when exactly
Wallace wrote/published a certain story or essay, where he was living at the
time, etc.). I liked it and I recommend it, and I hope this endorsement isn't
attenuated by the fact that I like reading really anything about Wallace; Every Love Story is a legitimately good
biography. (Though one little cavil: There's no account of the publication of The Pale King. Max takes the
uncompromising view that the story ends on Sept 12 2008, and most of the last
15 pages or so seem to be taken verbatim from his New Yorker article. Which is
ultimately fine (after all, most of the Pale
King info is out there if one wanted to track it down) but I was reading Every Love Story on a Kindle and didn't
realize that there were 50+ pages of endnotes, sources, and appendices (an
index? Really? In this day and age?), and so when I came to the end (only 74%
of the book, according to the progress bar), I fully expected at least a couple
dozen more pages, making the ending for me far more abrupt and aposiopetic than
the ending of Infinite Jest is
accused of being.)

Anyway, onward with the big reveals for even the DFW cognoscenti...

1. The essays were largely made-up

Grumblings about the veracity of the events in Wallace's non-fiction have been
building over the last year, and it turns out with good cause. While the
essays' jumping-off points remain verifiable (He did go to the State Fair, he did
go on a cruise, etc.), the details contained within are probably at the very least
exaggerated. There's no way of fact-checking every little thing, but Max does
an admirable job of uncovering when authorial liberty was taken, pointing out when
anecdotes were invented or stolen wholesale from another's experience. I didn't
mind this revelation too much since I've always considered Wallace’s
non-fiction less important than his fiction. And frankly, it does explain how,
in those essays, everyone around him had a knack for doing/saying the exact
right thing, constantly. But I can imagine the people who unreservedly love his
essays getting their hackles raised as Max systematically shoots down or casts
doubt on their favorite bits (the pinwheeling batons? Most likely exaggerated.
The little girl chess prodigy who knew what “fianchettoing” was? Probably
didn’t exist). For me, the most disappointing fudging Max points out is that
Wallace didn’t belong to a church group, a group that reportedly also had as a
member the person whose house Wallace casually strolls into Kramer-like in the
essay “The View From Mrs. Thompson’s.” Granted, the dissimulation here wasn’t done
for arbitrary or aesthetic reasons; the people in the essay were actually
members of his recovery group, so their anonymity (and, by extension, his) was
paramount. But still. It was one of
those details it seemed the whole (not very long) essay hinged on: Watching the
events of 9/11 unfold with members of
your church. There was a whole other interesting layer to that essay that
gets kind of stripped away now. (Wallace had to know how much more interesting
the essay was with this invented detail. So notable was it that even
Silverblatt went out of his way to bring it up during an interview.) This
exposure dishearteningly casts doubt on all the other stuff in the essay. Think
about that affecting story about his search for an American flag, the whole
going to gas station after gas station, finally arriving at an out-of-the-way convenience
store (that just happens to be owned by a Pakistani), making a homemade flag in
the backroom. After reading Max’s book, it’s hard to imagine Wallace actually
doing all that. It is, however, easy to imagine him writing about doing it.

2. He almost wrote a porn epic instead of Infinite Jest

In the early nineties he did
extensive research about porn with an eye toward writing some sort of
reportage/fiction about it—it’s kind of unclear what it was going to be
exactly. Whatever it would’ve been, it was going to be epic; he apparently got
hundreds of (lost?) pages into it. He was interviewing porn stars, watching
tons of porn, thinking about porn (“Why do many of the movies have a kind of
shadowy, dramatically superfluous character who seems to stand for the man
watching film…and whose final access to female lead(s) effects film’s closure?”),
etc. A lot of his research turns up in his essay “Big Red Son,” passed off as
newly discovered info (see #1). The whole project got derailed, perhaps
thankfully, considering we got IJ instead, though one wonders what Wallace would’ve come up with. A comment
made to a friend years later about the movie Boogie Nights offers a clue: He said it was exactly the story that
he had been trying to write. (DFW would not be so kind to PTA’s next film,
calling Magnolia pretentious and
hollow and “100% gradschoolish in a bad way.” Ouch.) (And but also n.b.: That dream-team dinner just got even more interesting…)

3. He was a p*ssy hound

Apparently. Sure, many people
recount him going off with random women after signings, and sure, he told
Franzen that he wondered whether his only purpose on earth was “to put [his]
penis in as many vaginas as possible.” But maybe he just went back to all those
womens’ places and didn’t actually effect coitus or whatever—like what
supposedly happened with Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Prozac Nation: they went back to her place, she decided she didn’t
want to, they didn’t. (Leading him to base the title character in “The
Depressed Person” on her, allegedly.) I mean it probably went down how it
looks, it’s just that if he had slept with even half the number implied in the
book, wouldn’t there be like a lot more self-congratulatory tumblrs out there,
eg. “I Slept With A Literary God” or something like that? Or even like a blog
account of the evening or something? Well, actually, maybe not.

A few other stray info-bits:

—Viking Penguin sent Wallace a
bill for $324.51 for his reversal of some of the copyedits of The Broom of the System

—Excerpt of letter sent to
copyeditor of Infinite Jest: “The
following non-standard features of this mss. are intentional and will get
stetted by the author if color-penciled by you: Neologisms, catachreses,
solecisms, and non-standard syntax in sections concerning the characters Minty,
Marathe, Antitoi, Krause, Pemulis, Steeply, Lenz, Orin Incandenza, Mario
Incandenza, Fortier, Foltz, J.O. Incandenza Sr., Schtitt, Gompert.”

—Girl With Curious Hair sold 2,200 hardcover copies

—A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again sold 15,000 hardcover
copies

—Oblivion sold 18,000 hardcover copies

—By 2006, 150,000 copies of Infinite Jest had been sold (one assumes
it’s into seven digits by now)

About Me

So I'm officially an author. My book is called Deadly Reflections, and is available on the Kindle Store right this second. I encourage anyone who likes a good love story with paranormal aspects to check it out!